Anxiety & Fear: Peace at Stake?

It’s only been a couple of months since your break-up. In the middle of a meeting, you feel your phone vibrate and you sneak a peek – it’s your ex. Instantly, your heart skips, dodges, and palpitates and the over welcomed mantra, “out of sight, out of mind” no longer rings true. Shit!

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Despite what you’ve been telling yourself, a prospective lover is a balanced mix of charm, thoughtfulness, and beauty, but is still humble and has admitted you’re the apple of his/her eye. Your heart, previously frozen from previous jerks, begins to thaw, but you can’t seem to articulate what’s going on. Every conversation brings more thoughts, you fantasize about the memories you two could create, and envision a new future. Your heart quivers with fear of the unknown, asking “can I trust him/her or will this end up like the rest?” Damn it!

So……

What do all of these scenarios have in common? They are real and we’ve all experienced them at some point in time. Now here’s the question: what’s the point of fear and what’s its purpose? In these scenarios it seems to be both a stepping stone and a stumbling block. It throws routine into the wastebasket and makes you apologize. So, what next?

Today I received an email that prompted this question and arm-wrestled me to a simple, but incomplete solution: you deal with it and you own it. Fear and anxiety, like every other emotion, have their rightful place at your “table,” but you don’t have to allow them to be the rowdy, party crashers. Instead, listen to the reasoning objectively and sift through the bull. At the end of the day, the following will ring true:

Fear can compel you to action or paralyze you to inaction.

Anxiety comes into the “kitchen” when the past decides to intrude on the present.

Regardless of the scenario, be gutsy, take risks, and unless it will rob you of your joy, place you or someone else in danger; you can only gain from the experience. You don’t have to doanything. Anxiety and fear can fill your head with tons of emotions, muddling clear thinking and your ability to make conscious decisions for your benefit. But, when you take the time to “freeze” time and put the pros and cons on paper or talk about out it out loud in front of the bathroom mirror, you’ll be surprised what you’ll realize. Hopefully, you’ll see you had the answer the entire time, but just needed a more creative way to get to it.